Sunday, January 18, 2009

Motels with "free wireless broadband"?

Sounded too good to be true, and yes it was. We stayed at the Sandcastles apartments at Coffs Harbour which advertised "free wireless broadband".

As we checked in I noted two WRT-54g routers on the reception desk. It turned out that the "freeness" only amounted to half an hour of use, after that you had to buy tokens in inconvenient combinations of hours and expiry times.

They are running Chillispot and I certainly experienced some outages where I couldn't get an IP address from the DHCP server. I rang reception and she had just one possible action which was to restart the router. That didn't help. I wasn't too fussed and after a few hours it started working again.

I really wish I could tether my iPhone and just use that for internet while on the road.

The other amusing thing about Sandcastles was these amazing deck chairs that rather reminded me of the furniture at the milk bar in a Clockwork Orange.